Throughout most of my science classes, I have learned about how humans and apes share a very high percentage of DNA. In these classes, we never learned about ape’s behavior in their natural habitat. We only learned about how apes acted in a controlled environment that was controlled by humans. The video “The New Chimpanzee” really made me see Chimpanzee in a new light. I didn’t know that Chimpanzees ate meat. I also didn’t realize that they would hunt monkeys and other Chimpanzees for food. What shocked me was to find out they would gather in groups and attack another group of monkeys or chimpanzees to make a statement on showing who is more dominate. They would also kill all the males of another group so that they could steal the women of those groups of chimpanzees. The one thing that blew my mind was that they would kill a baby chimpanzee to either mate or show dominate again. This is much different from how they were acting in a controlled environment. One of the primary teaching that they were showing in the videos were the chimpanzees were in a controlled environment was that they could learn sign language. This reminded me of humans using violence to do similar actions, for example, war. This shows me that violence was passed down from apes to humans.

Another interesting thing I learned was how apes went from walking on all four of their limbs to walking up straight on two legs. Humans start moving by crawling to eventually standing up.  Human evolution allowed us to permanently stand on our two legs to travel. The video about non-human primate using tools was also fascinating to me. This shows how similar humans are with non-human primates. Humans use tools to make a task easier to do and so do non-human primates like apes and monkeys. I surprised at how monkeys and apes would use rocks to smash nuts and sticks to collect ants. The Video also showed how monkey and apes have to learn how to use tools in order to use them effectively. That indicates that everything is not learned through animal instincts for apes and monkey. This shows a relationship between humans and apes and monkeys in learning.

To better understand our biology, behavior, and culture, we should be studying- non- human primates. Since we have 96 percent of the same DNA as Chimpanzees, I think this would be good to do. Before we do that, we need to study ourselves. We should study ourselves to figure out how we react and behave in situations. Then after that, we should study non-human primates to see if we have similarities or differences. We already know a lot of information from the research that has already been done.  I still think there is more information we continue to learn by observing non-human primates. After reading the articles and watching videos, I’ve learned a lot of information. I know there has to be more information we can learn if try different methods while observing.